From the left

[andrewducker]

Leftist critique of the anti-war movement.

Comments

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

We have already killed almost as many people since the war started than Saddam was purported to kill each year, only we've done it in the last 5 months. Part of the death is a result of the sewage system we've worsened with the war, one that will be 18 months before it's back to merely pre-war conditions. Nowhere in the article are these points recognized.

Nor, also, is the fact that no one wanted Saddam in power, but some felt that there were less volatile ways of going about it. Sure, Baathists would have been in power a bit longer, but a smoother transition could have assured the Iraqi people a better esteem on the situation, less killed as a direct result of the invasion, and in general a more humanitarian way of getting people back in order. It really was possible.

I, on the other hand, have absolutely no interest in the bleeding heart nature of this crap. I'm a republican, and this just plain wasn't our business in my concern. Furthermore, I believe that the only way a people can truly achieve freedom and democracy is for them to revolt and choose it for themselves. Had they asked us to come in and help, that would have been a different story; but they did not.

We invaded, and no amount of "humanitarism" can evade that fact. We bombed them. We killed. Sorry. And now we're responsible for the aftermath, all $70B and counting of it, all 16 Million of them and their health, and all of their (volatile) neighborly relations. Is it really worth it? Or perhaps waiting for the rest of the world, or the Iraqis themselves, might have been a bit wiser?

[andrewducker]

Had they asked us to come in and help, that would have been a different story; but they did not.

Actually, they did.

First they rose up in 1991, when they were told that they would be supported by the US. The US abandoned them and the rebels were slaughtered and tortured to death.

And then, in the run-up to the recent war I read numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, you don't understand, you _have_ to invade and save us."

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

And then, in the run-up to the recent war I read numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, you don't understand, you _have_ to invade and save us."

And there were also numerous articles by Iraqi refugees based in the UK saying "No, I don't want to see my country bombed."

Do you read blogs? There's a fascinating blog by an Iraq code-named "Raed" - his blogname is "Dear_Raed" - which expresses a lot of the ambiguity that Iraqis felt about the US/UK invasion of Iraq.

On the one hand, in only a few months the US/UK invasion killed as many civilians as the article you linked to claimed Saddam Hussein killed in a year (and I express it that way because I am taking this guy's figures as accurate, not because I want to deny that Saddam Hussein is a bloodthirsty tyrant). And one reason why so many were killed is because the US/UK showed little regard for civilian Iraqi lives as compared to the lives of soldiers in the invading armies. And the civilian death toll is still mounting, and will continue to do so, in part because the US is making a complete mess of reconstruction in Iraq, in part because the US has refused to take any part in clearing up the cluster bomblets that it dropped on Iraqi towns and cities. (Each cluster bomblet is the equivalent of an extremely lethal landmine. But because of a legal technicality, they're not included under landmines.)

Tony Blair said of invading Iraq that history would judge. What I assume he meant was that 20 years down the line, Iraq will look so different and so better than it did under Saddam Hussein that this would justify the thousands of people killed to accomplish it. (No one is counting the Iraqi soldiers.)

But the fact is, right now, and thanks to the US assumption that everything profitable has to be hived off to American companies, and any government has to be reliably and solidly pro-US, there is no sign that that's going to happen. There is no evidence that Bush and Co want it to happen.

To argue that it was a good thing to invade Iraq, kill people by the thousands, kill more people by destroying infrastructure and allowing hospitals to be looted, and leave Iraq in chaos for months, in order to install another dictator - who may not be as bad as Saddam Hussein, but who will not be appointed on any criteria other than "Is he pro-US?" - this is all criminal nonsense.

[andrewducker]

I do find it terribly amusing that you talk about the ambiguity felt by Iraqis and say
on the one hand and then only mention the negative side, never coming back to the ambiguity or that other hand...

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

*grins* I do find the slips I make in first-draft writing a cross between amusing and annoying: I really wish it were possible to edit comments on LJ. Sometimes, when a mistake is truly annoying (like an HTML unclosed bracket) or affects the meaning of a sentence, I'll go through the process of reposting the comment and deleting the original version. But I didn't consider it worthwhile in this particular instance.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, me too. I wrote something last week on my personal wiki, and then asked a friend to proofread it.

I then updated it 14 times over the course of the day, largely because I realised that the individual paragraphs were ok in their own right, but the flow of the argument was _terrible_.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

1991 is not 2003, I don't count that. That is more of what I'm talking about, but we completely screwed that up then.

Yes, I'd read that about a lot of refugees, but it's easy to say, "Yes, go take it over," once you've left. That's not people in the country asking for that to happen. That's also not asking for *help*, which is a different thing. What I mean is like the USA asking France for help for their revolution, and vice versa. Liberia stacking dead bodies in front of the US Embassy to get help is a good modern example.

No, "Hey, go in and take my country over, I don't live there anymore," is not anything like the essence of what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people being able to gain their independence for themselves -- no matter what we've been told lately, going in and "liberating" isn't giving them any sense of independence, it's taking over for them.

[andrewducker]

Which is like saying the Allies shouldn't have invaded France at the end of WW2, because it did no good for the French, they should have liberated themselves.

There was no way they could have risen up and overthrown Saddam. They'd been shot and tortured into submission and had nowhere near the resources.

These weren't people who had ambled out for a holiday and then said "Oh, I don't mind if you invade my country." They were brutalised refugees asking for their home back because a madman had taken it over.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

Which is like saying the Allies shouldn't have invaded France at the end of WW2, because it did no good for the French, they should have liberated themselves.

No, it's not. Not even remotely. First of all, France was actually invaded. Second of all, they were requesting help, and we'd have gotten nowhere without their underground system.

There was no way they could have risen up and overthrown Saddam. They'd been shot and tortured into submission and had nowhere near the resources.

Yes, which is why they needed help. However, we weren't helping them with their revolution, we were taking it over "for them". There is a very fundamental difference here.

These weren't people who had ambled out for a holiday and then said "Oh, I don't mind if you invade my country." They were brutalised refugees asking for their home back because a madman had taken it over.

Ok, by this rationale, when are we invading China?

[andrewducker]

China, thankfully, is liberalising. Has been for over 15 years now. The old guard is fading and the new guard has been turning to capitalism as fast as they can get their hands on money.

An awful lot of countries are doing this, and when they do there's no reason to do anything about it.

Even countries that aren't can frequently be democratised in the long term by using political and financial pressure.

Iraq wasn't responding to political pressure and wasn't economically presurrable, due to the large amount of oil it was sitting on.

[gwenix.livejournal.com]

Iraq wasn't responding to political pressure

Sure it was. It did get rid of the WMDs due to political pressure, and most of the atrocities cited it now are from the late 80's, early 90's. You could argue it's not that much, but you can't say it wasn't at all.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I hesitate to recommend this, not least because despite having been "edited for typos" there are still a bunch in there. And some misplaced apostrophes. However...

A blogger called Hesiod deconstructs the argument that Iraq was a 'humanitarian intervention'. (http://counterspin.blogspot.com/2003_08_03_counterspin_archive.html#106000440402961644)